By Rene Parker, Director at Rlabs
From statistics to humanity and connection
The discussion surrounding South Africa’s youth employment challenge is far too often confined to cold, impersonal statistics: unemployment rates, GDP deficits, and nebulous skills gaps. This is a critical error, because this is fundamentally not a crisis of spreadsheets or dry economic models; it is a profound and systemic crisis of humanity and connection. We must elevate the foundational African philosophy of Ubuntu – the recognition that “I am because we are”, from an inspiring concept to the active, central principle guiding all our work in the development sector. When we frame the solution purely in terms of what is allegedly missing in young people, we commit the great disservice of ignoring the most powerful asset we already have: the incredible, often unstoppable resilience and profound hope inherent in young South Africans.
This issue is not a standalone problem that can be fixed with isolated programmes; it is deeply and tragically intertwined with a host of other societal factors, including the lingering effects of generational trauma, pervasive cultural biases that wrongly label entrepreneurship as a ‘fallback’ position rather than a viable career, and the daily, exhausting struggle simply to maintain personal safety and dignity. We must fully accept that one cannot effectively bridge a financing gap, without first meaningfully addressing the deeper, holistic need for mental well-being and the cultural confidence required for any young person to take the significant leap into enterprise creation.
Agency, drive and self-determination
The truth I have witnessed countless times and the point I emphasised during the IPASA Annual Philanthropy Symposium is unmistakable: young people possess an innate, irresistible drive, and they will move whether they have formal funding or not. They are not passive, empty vessels waiting to be filled with aid. They are already demonstrating their agency by launching small businesses from their homes, creatively pooling scarce resources within their immediate communities, and building extensive digital networks with little more than borrowed data. This powerful, primal drive, this profound sense of self-determination, is the entrepreneurial spirit in its purest, most vibrant form. More than that, this energy is intensely contagious.
Consider the real-world example of a young woman in an informal settlement who begins a basic enterprise washing and detailing vehicles. She does not possess a formal business plan, nor has she secured a large seed grant. She starts with the minimal resources available: a hosepipe, a bucket, and an unrelenting sense of possibility. As her small operation begins to gain even marginal traction, her entire community observes her success. Perhaps a slightly older youth, who had previously felt discouraged and directionless, sees the activity and begins to offer supplementary services, such as repairing punctures for her customers. A close neighbor notices the waiting clients and starts selling cold drinks or snacks to people waiting for their cars to be finished. Her initial spark of hope and powerful self-determination has achieved more than just generating an income for her; it has inspired and catalysed a microeconomy of possibility. This dynamic is the very essence of Ubuntu in action, where one person’s belief and effort immediately becomes the collective, shared fuel for broader communal transformation. Our primary job, as external funders and developers, is not to try and clumsily ignite this existing fire; our job is to, strategically and sustainably, ensure it never runs out of oxygen.
The youth entrepreneurship funding landscape
The IPASA, Youth Entrepreneurship Funding Landscape Scoping Report provides us with an essential, though potentially uncomfortable, self-assessment of our current performance. While there is undeniably tremendous capital available and a deep commitment to the cause, our existing systems often fail catastrophically due to a critical lack of proximity and holistic coherence. This report clearly highlights that a disproportionate amount of philanthropic capital is heavily concentrated at the very early, ideation, or start-up phase. This means that we, as a sector, are excellent at successfully lighting the initial spark but are demonstrably terrible at providing the necessary long-term fuel required for sustainability.
When a promising young enterprise reaches the point where it desperately needs the follow-on funding, sophisticated market access, and targeted scaling support (what is often referred to as the notorious missing middle), the pipeline consistently and dramatically breaks. This fracture is not a random glitch; it is nearly always a direct and painful symptom of designing prescriptive, top-down solutions for youth, rather than developing them authentically with the youth. In essence, we are operating far too comfortably and securely, too far away from their daily, grinding reality. Therefore, the fundamental question we must address is: How do we fundamentally shift the approach to move much closer to the very young people whose dreams and aspirations we profess to support? This requires us to fundamentally change our perspective and our approach to funding.
Moving closer to daily reality on the ground
Moving closer demands a profound shift in what we are willing to recognise and financially support. We must commit to funding the whole person, not merely the discrete project or the sanitised business plan. We need to fully acknowledge and fund the complex, whole human reality. If a talented young entrepreneur is simultaneously battling unresolved trauma, navigating persistent cultural stigma within their family or community, or struggling with unreliable, dilapidated infrastructure, the most generous seed grant in the world will likely not guarantee their long-term success.
Funding proximity means that we must design holistic funding and support models that explicitly recognise and support mental health and personal resilience as absolutely core, non-negotiable components of any enterprise development model. We must develop the deep humility we need, to respect that the reality of their lived environment must dictate the pace and the eventual trajectory of their growth. Furthermore, co-designing for real impact must become a non-negotiable principle of agency and respect. Funders and development sector stakeholders can no longer justify creating solutions for young people without genuinely and consistently seating them at the table. We need to move far past tokenistic, superficial consultations.
We must fully integrate youth leaders into our highest-level advisory committees, our strategic programme design teams, and our essential monitoring and evaluation processes. This integration does far more than simply improve our optics; it dramatically improves our actual efficiency and success rates. By actively listening to their lived experience: what type of transport solutions they actually need, which funding structures they fundamentally trust, and which specific kind of mentorship they actually respect, we can finally help create an enabling environment that genuinely works. We must understand their ground-level reality, wholeheartedly respect their ambitious vision, and empower them to play a tangible, active role in shaping the shared future we all hope to achieve.
Creating a cohesive, shared ecosystem
The only viable way to ensure that the significant capital we inject translates directly and sustainably into long-term, systemic change is through the creation of a cohesive, shared ecosystem that is intentionally built on the principle of Ubuntu, a principle of shared accountability and collective ownership. This means that we must purposefully move past our currently isolated ‘islands of excellence, and possibly utilise the critical, sobering findings of the IPASA scoping report to construct a fully formalised collaboration architecture.
Specifically, we need to achieve two crucial things:
- First, we must build truly pipeline-linked models. This requires us to actively partner with other diverse funders to ensure a seamless, uninterrupted pathway for entrepreneurs that runs logically from the initial ideation phase all the way through to successful scaling, thereby effectively and permanently closing the structural missing middle.
- Second, we must agree on genuinely shared success. This means adopting a common, standardised set of impact measurement frameworks so that we can stop the unproductive cycle of competing with one another for individual recognition and instead begin measuring our collective success based on powerful, shared metrics like the sustained enterprise survival rate and the total number of quality sustained jobs created.
Becoming trusted partners in possibility
Our ultimate commitment must be to move permanently from being distant, bureaucratic dispensers of capital to becoming proximate, trusted partners in possibility.
By funding hope, by honoring agency, and by fully embodying Ubuntu, we can finally ensure that the unstoppable, magnificent energy of South Africa’s youth is successfully channeled into a future of profound and lasting economic transformation for the benefit of every single one of us.